"Sixty Years of Marriage"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Sixty Years of Marriage”

April 13, 2024

 

“Marriage, N. The state or condition of a community consisting

of a master, a mistress, two slaves, making in all, two”

                                                                                                                                Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914)

                                                                                                                                The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

 

“There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming 

relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.”

                                                                                                                                Martin Luther (1483-1546)[1]

                                                                                                                                Table Talk

Published posthumously in 1566

 

Two days ago Caroline and I celebrated sixty years of marriage.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Winston Churchill once allegedly said: “My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.” Whether Churchill said that or not, the statement is true of me. I still marvel that Caroline accepted my marriage proposal. I was, at the time, a college drop out with no prospects. Military service was in my future, as was finishing college. Yet, she said yes.

 

Sixty years is a long time. Sixty years before we were married was 1904 – the year construction began on the Panama Canal, the year fingerprints were first used as an investigative tool, and the year Cy Young pitched the first perfect game in modern baseball, as the Boston Americans beat the Philadelphia Athletics 3-0. It was three years before my grandparents were married and six years before my father was born.

 

The last sixty years – because we lived through them – do not carry the same weight as earlier ones, though they might for our grandchildren. When we married Lyndon Johnson had been in the White House less than five months, the first major battle between U.S. Forces and the Army of North Vietnam was seventeen months in the future, the moon was unblemished by human footprints, a postage stamp cost $0.05, college tuition was $1,700, the average cost of a house in the U.S. was $18,900, and a gallon of gas cost $0.30. My starting salary at Eastman Kodak in June 1965, however, was $6,000.00.

 

But marriage cannot be measured by historical events or the effects of inflation on goods, services, and income. It is, when one thinks of it, amazing that so many marriages endure. Courting, even for two years as we did, does not offer the time to really know the other person. In fact, we never stop learning about the person we wed. Sociologists and marriage counselors have long pondered which maxim best applies to marriage: that opposites attract, or whether it is birds of a feather. More likely, it is love, luck, temperament, and tolerance that play key roles. Peering back into the mists of sixty years, I am thankful we never thought deeply about such matters. The future arrived one step at a time.

 

We had grown up differently, Caroline in New York City and I in the small New Hampshire town of Peterborough. But we fell in love, that indescribable (and delightful) condition that defies definition. There is no question that we are different in many respects, but we also share common interests, the most important being devotion to one another, our three children, their spouses, and our ten grandchildren.

 

Our first home was a 500 square foot, $85.00 a month, apartment in Durham, New Hampshire where I was finishing my degree at the University of New Hampshire. Because of my initial conduct in college (completing one year of credits in two years), I had to pay for my room, board and tuition when I returned following military service. So, in the next two years I completed three years of credits – while working three jobs – finishing in February 1965 (proof that the proffered hand is not necessarily as productive as the calloused one). With a job at Kodak[2] starting in June, and as we had had no honeymoon, we took $2,000.00 we had saved, bought round-trip tickets to Paris, and spent eleven weeks traveling around southern Europe in a rented Volkswagen without an itinerary. It was a memorable start for our marriage.  

 

Our voyage since has taken us through five Connecticut towns: Glastonbury (one year), Durham (four years), Greenwich (twenty-four years), Old Lyme (twenty-three years, along with a small one-bedroom apartment in New York for seventeen of those years), and now Essex where we have lived for the past eight years. 

 

We met on New Year’s Eve of 1961 at a ski weekend near my hometown. My sister who had known Caroline at Garland Junior College in Boston introduced us that afternoon. That evening I monopolized her. We saw each other regularly for the next several weekends, until on March 11 in North Conway, New Hampshire I asked for her hand. She said yes. The next day, on our first run down Wildcat Mountain, she broke her leg. At the time I was working in a laboratory outside of Boston. I spoke to my father, who was with my younger sister Betsy who was racing at Cranmore Mountain. I told him what had happened, including my proposal of the night before. He told me my duty was to stay with Caroline even if it cost me my job, which it did; for, as he said, you can always get another, which I did.

 

In his 1922 novel The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse wrote: “And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.” While neither of our fathers repeated those exact words to me, I could tell they were thinking them. We got married on April 11, 1964 in New York’s Church of the Heavenly Rest, in a service conducted by the Reverend Floyd Thomas – to join hands “…till death do us part.”

 

In Adam Bede, George Eliot wrote: “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories of the last parting.” Amen.

 

Together we move on, happy and still in love.

 

 

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[1] Martin Luther, once a Catholic monk, married Katherine von Bora, a former num, in April 1523, two years after he had been excommunicated by Pope Leo X.

[2] In the summer of 1967, I became a stockbroker – my career for the next 48 years.